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PRESENTED BY 



WILLIAM ENDICOTT 



BY 



ROBERT S. RANTOUL 




BOSTON 
1915 





62^£^<* 



WILLIAM ENDICOTT 



BY 



ROBERT S. RANTOUL 




BOSTON 
1915 






From the 

Proceedings oe the Massachusetts Historical Society 

tor January, 19 15 






JU 



MEMOIR 



The subject of this memoir was a unique personality. He 
was born at Beverly, January 4, 1826. His father was William 
Endicott, who succeeded Robert Rantoul, Senior, in the 
country store established by the latter at Beverly in 1796. 
William is a name of frequent recurrence with the Endicotts — 
a Dorsetshire family — and one William Endecotte was a 
"full fellow" on the rolls of Exeter College, Oxford, in 1580. 
Since 1774, the Endicotts of New England have spelled the 
name with an "i." The elder William Endicott was of the 
nearest generation of descendants living in his day, from the 
Colonial Governor, and was a son of Robert Endicott of Bev- 
erly, whose wife was a Holt of Dan vers. This Beverly William 
Endicott died at Beverly in 1899, when lacking in age but a 
month of his full century. He was nine months old when 
Washington died. He married in 1824 Joanna Lovett, the 
eldest child of Robert Rantoul, Senior, and she was the mother 
of our subject, and died at St. Louis while journeying at the 
West in 1863. 

William Endicott of whom we write showed, as a child, 
marked intelligence and activity. I grew up in close touch 
with him — too close, perhaps, to view him objectively and to 
see him in his true perspective. When we went nutting or 
berrying or fishing, not only was he the life of the party, but he 
was sure to bring home more nuts or berries or fish than any 
other member of it. When told that his mother's cousin, An- 
drew Preston Peabody, had, as a child, first learned to read the 
inverted page while he stood at the knee of a teacher who was 
hearing recitations, it appeared that young Endicott had mas- 
tered the same odd accomplishment. As a schoolboy he passed 
a summer vacation on a farm at Andover. There he solved 



the mystery of cheese-making — constructed a practicable toy 
cheese-press and in it made miniature cheeses, of the size of 
a Spanish dollar, which he distributed among his playmates. 

He was destined for Harvard College, but his parents hesi- 
tated to fit him for professional life, medical advisers ques- 
tioning whether he could bear the strain. Pulmonary con- 
sumption was the universal dread in Beverly at that time, 
attributed by Agassiz, when he first visited the town in 1846, 
to the conformation of the coast. It has since lost much of its 
terror. But, on leaving the Beverly Academy, an incorporated 
school, well kept at that time by Thomas Barnard West of 
Salem, young Endicott, at the age of fourteen — he had no 
further schooling — joined his father in his local business and 
was there not long after discovered by the late Charles Fox 
Hovey, who had just left the Boston firm of J. C. Howe and 
Company and had, with partners, set up in business for him- 
self, and was building at that time his summer residence on 
the high ground west of Gloucester Harbor. The Endicotts 
were customers of the Hovey Company, and Mr. Hovey, in 
riding through Beverly to Gloucester — there was no railroad 
to Gloucester then — often stopped and did business with 
them. In this way he was aware of the rare faculty shown by 
the subject of this sketch in grasping business problems, and 
became anxious to offer him a place as treasurer in his Boston 
warehouse. He did not wait long to welcome him as a partner. 
Mr. Hovey was a Jeffersonian Democrat and a very independent 
thinker, and was in declared sympathy with the anti-slavery 
agitation then becoming rife. The Endicotts held like politi- 
cal views, William Endicott, Senior, having supported Craw- 
ford for President in 1824, and later Jackson. Young Endi- 
cott's maternal grandfather had been a rigid Federalist and a 
disciple of Timothy Pickering, imbued with all the party's 
jealousy of slave-representation and slavery extension, often 
chosen to office through that party's support, and only quit- 
ting it or what remained of it in 1828, in revolt against the 
protectionist policy of Clay, Secretary of State under John 
Quincy Adams, then a candidate for a second Presidential 
term. It was this so-called " American System" which drove 
scores of old-line Federalists, with Pickering at their head, into 
the support of Jackson. 



No sooner had young Endicott found himself in the receipt 
of an income than he began to indulge the public spirit which 
marked his career. At times he lived in Boston and at times 
spent the night in Beverly, for the railroad lately opened made 
the latter course possible. He early joined a little group of 
young townsmen in offering concerts, in stimulating the growth 
of a public library, and in sustaining the historic Lyceum. 
When he passed between Beverly and Boston day by day, the 
extent to which he made himself the medium of transmission 
for messages and errands at the service of his friends — there 
was no express conveyance then — anticipated his life-long 
practice of bearing others' burdens. Before the Civil War 
broke out he had identified himself with the new " Republican 
Party," and supported Julius Rockwell for Governor in 1855 
and Fremont for President in 1856. He was contributing to 
party funds, attending party conventions, and was so far recog- 
nized as a co-worker with Whittier, and Dr. Howe, and Amos 
A. Lawrence, and George L. Stearns, in extra-political efforts to 
save Kansas to Freedom that, when the John Brown raid 
startled us in 1859, he was among those branded as "suspect" 
by the Mason Senatorial Committee. But his sympathies 
were, in the main, with the advocates of political movements 
and constitutional measures — of such steps as Lincoln, and 
Chase, and Whittier, and Sumner, and Judge Hoar, and Gov- 
ernor Andrew advocated, rather than with the extremists who 
denounced the Constitution and distrusted and disparaged the 
Union. He disliked their methods, and while he made a con- 
tribution which secured to Garrison the statue in Common- 
wealth Avenue, because he thought the man who unselfishly 
supports his honest convictions at the risk of his life has earned 
a monument, he said from first to last that the extremists, sin- 
cere as they were in their efforts, played but a small part in the 
abolition of slavery. He thought, with the old Federalists, that 
we had been drawn, under the stress of revolt against British 
despotism, into making a necessary compact with the Southern 
colonies which they had come to feel their interests compelled 
them to annul. He thought the North should keep faith, but 
he would enforce an equal obligation on the South. 

From time to time he took active part in political conven- 
tions. He was present in 1856 at the gathering in Philadelphia 



which nominated Fremont, and again at the mortifying fiasco at 
Cincinnati in 1872 where, unable to profit by the moderation 
of such advisers as Carl Schurz, and Horace White and him- 
self, public-spirited men, called together to attempt the defeat of 
Grant for a second term in the Presidency, adopted the inconse- 
quent step of nominating Horace Greeley. During the years 
when Butler was storming the Republican citadel for that 
party's nomination as Governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Endicott 
made it a duty to be present and active during the midnight 
disturbances preceding those conventions, and did much to 
defeat the struggles of a political ambition which was at last 
rewarded only by recourse to the support of another party. 

Mr. Endicott had a disinclination for public life. Often 
urged to become a candidate for Congress, he uniformly refused. 
He distrusted his capacity for addressing people in numbers. 
He was probably right in thinking that he did better to rely on 
his facile pen and his earnest, persuasive, personal appeal for 
bringing his clean-cut convictions to the notice of the possible 
convert. But in practical politics he was no dilettante. He 
was willing to bear his share of the unpleasantness of election- 
day drudgery rather than have to reflect that unsatisfactory 
results might have been less serious but for his inaction. Three 
days before his death, though suffering much, he cast his vote 
in the State election. 

He was an indifferent speaker. His choice of phrase was 
nice and scholarly, but his voice was not effective, nor was his 
presence commanding, and he always shrunk from speaking in 
public. Twice I saw him called on without notes to address a 
gathering. In both instances he acquitted himself well. Once 
he addressed this Society in the commemorative observances on 
the death of Norton. And once he addressed the Massachu- 
setts Republican State Central Committee at a dinner ten- 
dered, in Henry Cabot Lodge's first year in the chair, to Gov- 
ernor-elect Robinson, on the defeat of Butler. But his con- 
tributions to the campaigns in which he enlisted were mainly 
literary and financial, and in the Butler campaign, and again 
in the McKinley-Bryan campaign of 1896, he produced finan- 
cial papers which were reprinted throughout the country and 
even in English journals of authority, such as John Bright's 
Daily News, as apt to afford aid to the stability of our currency 



and of the public credit. His printed reminiscences show how 
deeply he studied fiscal questions. 

Mr. Endicott's active career was co-terminous with the 
latter half of the nineteenth century. This was a period of 
rare activity in our quarter of the world. Great industrial 
and scientific changes were afoot. Facilities for the transporta- 
tion of persons and freight took the great start which made 
possible the wonderful development of our Northwest, and 
facilities for the transmission of intelligence, quite as vital to 
the rapid growth of the country, went through a radical revolu- 
tion. The relation of an active-minded, public-spirited man to 
the developments going on about him has an interest beyond 
mere personal concern. 

The first transcontinental railway enterprise was under- 
taken, at the beginning of this era, by eastern capitalists who 
proposed to unite by continuous lines the Great Lakes with 
Mobile Bay. Such needed legislation as Senator Stephen 
Arnold Douglas could not secure at Washington, from the 
general government, remained for my father, representing 
the corporators of whom he was one, to secure at Springfield 
from the State of Illinois. But the Illinois Central Railroad, 
after starting out auspiciously, was plunged into untold dis- 
aster, which was precipitated by the defalcation of its presi- 
dent, and prolonged by the panic of 1857. My father died 
suddenly in 1852, and Mr. Endicott joined Charles Greely 
Loring in an effort to extricate his estate from the disorder. 
From that time on there was no year in which Mr. Endicott 
was not actively studying the problems of railway traffic, until 
federal legislation, enacted in Roosevelt's time, made it un- 
safe, in Mr. Endicott's view, longer to hold railroad securities. 

This experience, coupled with an inborn detestation of war, 
and the natural leaning of an importer and a Democrat towards 
the greatest practicable freedom of trade, promptly brought him 
into sympathetic touch with Richard Cobden, the father of 
the anti-corn-law agitation in England, the apostle of the 
British free-trade evangel, the negotiator of the epoch-making 
commercial treaty between England and France, when, in 
1854, that statesman made his second tour of the United States 
in the interest of a group of English holders of securities in 
the Illinois Central Railroad. Mr. Cobden, with many friends 



8 



who followed his lead, was involved in the common disaster. 
He suffered in repute and in purse, and he died at the close of 
our Civil War, after noble service rendered in behalf of the 
struggling Union. In the Cobden Club, formed the next year, 
Mr. Endicott was made an honorary member, and with John 
Bright he maintained an intimate and friendly correspond- 
ence while they both lived. 

The momentary success of the first Atlantic cable enterprise 
was announced late in 1858, but the enterprise was doomed to 
a long interval of coma before it reached its ultimate issue. 
Mr. Endicott had his own reasons for putting its claim to a 
rigid test. Doubters were many. Mr. Endicott sent a despatch 
to the bureau of Hovey and Company in Paris, conveying by 
cable an item of personal intelligence which could by no con- 
ceivable form of collusion have reached Paris at the time of its 
receipt in any other way, and that despatch hangs there framed 
to-day — silent witness to a fact having at that time very con- 
siderable import for the sender. An adventurous group of capi- 
talists had taken measures to unite New York and Chicago with 
St. Petersburg, Paris and London, by means of electric wires 
strung on poles across Alaska, Bering Strait and northern Asia. 
Funds were in hand for the preliminary steps, surveys were prac- 
tically complete, and the enterprise only awaited the failure of 
the submarine experiment that it might feel the vital spark. 

Quern, si non tenuit, magnis tamen excidit ausis! 

Though marked throughout by close attention to the routine 
of business, Mr. Endicott's life was not without its picturesque 
features. At one time he was condemned for months to abso- 
lute vacuity of mind — the penalty of overwork — and was 
directed to seek some region which mails and telegraphs did 
not invade. Only the polar zones would answer now, but at 
that time such a resort was offered by the drowsy current of 
the Nile. Weeks of listless drifting in a sumptuously equipped 
dahabieh restored his vigor and left him more a stranger to 
what was going on in the busy world than the deaf-mute of our 
day is permitted to be. The comparison is a fair one, for he was 
a long time treasurer of the Perkins Institution for the Blind 
and greatly interested in what he found there, and especially 
in the acquirements of Helen Keller, sometimes entertaining 



her at his Beverly home. Friends had died, business ventures 
had gone wrong, a portion of his life had drifted away during 
his enforced period of occultation. Before leaving Egypt he 
had been presented at the sybaritic court of the Khedive, and 
had sipped coffee from his golden cups and shared a whiff from 
his amber- tipped chibouk. Few men not wedded to sea life 
had crossed the Atlantic oftener than he. Finding himself one 
year approaching at the Christmas season the neighborhood 
of Palestine, he thought it would be a pleasant memory to pass 
the yearly festival at what is claimed to be the Holy Sepulchre 
and to take part there in the prescribed observances of the 
hour. On arriving he found a party of Greek Church pilgrims 
engaged in a wrangle for precedence with a party of pilgrims of 
the Church of Rome, and it became so violent as to call for 
the intervention of Mussulman militia to preserve the peace! 

The number and variety of groups with which Mr. Endi- 
cott kept himself in touch bear witness to the catholicity of his 
tastes. He was constant for thirty years in his attendance at 
the monthly dinners of the Saturday Club. Certainly it was 
no small compliment for a little club, made up of the very first 
characters — a club of which Dr. Holmes could say that 
" Emerson was the nucleus around which it gathered," a club 
of which Agassiz could say that "it had enlarged his view of 
life," a club at which every foreigner worth meeting who 
came to America was a guest, a club where Emerson "found 
his attitude mainly that of a listener" and which he looked to 
for his ideal of club life — "In our club no man shall be ad- 
mitted who is not worth in his skin five hundred thousand. 
One of them I hold worth a million, for he bows to facts, has 
no impertinent will, and nobody has come to the end of his 
resources" — for such a club, "a focus of good-sense, wisdom 
and high patriotism, whence sprung many measures important 
to the country " — for such a club as this to invite one who 
had no claim to authorship, or statesmanship, or comradeship, 
but was a simple, unassuming business man, only qualified by 
keen native wit, a close touch with such careers while in the 
making as Whittier's, and Lowell's, and Judge Rockwood 
Hoar's, and Judge John Lowell's, by a very broad intelli- 
gence of what was passing in the world at large and a friendly 
hand for everybody — for such a club to invite him was the 
compliment of a lifetime. 



IO 

He was a founder and a working member of Mr. Forbes' 
Loyal Publication Society. He was honored with an election 
as president of the New England Historic Genealogical 
Society, which he declined, and as president of the Boston 
Museum of Fine Arts, which he accepted after serving for a 
full generation as its indispensable first treasurer; and he was 
reckoned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as its 
wheel-horse — one of its earliest, its most active and its most 
untiring helpers. At the Massachusetts General Hospital and 
McLean Asylum he indulged himself for years in the luxurious 
munificence of a free bed or two, and for a quarter-century 
he served that charity in the onerous and exacting function of 
a State Director. When Governor Butler found himself con- 
strained by his sense of public duty to dispense with his fur- 
ther service, and named a Director to succeed him, a vacancy 
by resignation was at once created, which could be filled by 
the Board without recourse to the executive conscience. To 
it he was elected, so that his service continued without in- 
terruption. In company with ex-Governor Long, and with an 
eminent practical builder, he was appointed by Governor 
Ames to the Commission of Three which supervised the State 
House Extension of 1889, and his exact system of accounting 
— he dispensed with all clerical aid, his own delicate handwrit- 
ing serving him to the exclusion of secretary, typewriter and 
stenographer — has left on record at the State Capitol a lasting 
memorial of what was understood in the nineteenth century by 
devotion to public duty. 

That the men who did the fighting should seek the fellowship 
of the men who stayed at home and did the financiering was an 
honor upon which both Mr. Forbes and he set a high value. 
But nobody perceives more keenly than the soldier what a 
terrible load the war-financier is bearing, nor what Sumner 
meant when he wrote to Fessenden that the next great battle 
was to be fought in Wall Street, nor what it means to the 
country if obligations are not promptly met and service- 
money promptly forthcoming, nor what a hopeless mob a 
great army becomes the moment it finds itself in need of food 
and clothing. Mr. Endicott was the last survivor of the honor- 
ary membership of the Loyal Legion of Massachusetts. 

Mr. Endicott married, in 1856, Mrs. Annie Thorndike, 



II 

widow of John Frederick Nourse of Boston. She died in 
1876, leaving him with two children. 

It would be idle, in a paper of this kind, to attempt a cata- 
logue of the public philanthropies and private charities with 
which he filled his life, and yet without this feature the picture 
is unfinished. Unpaid service seemed to be his highest privilege. 
He was one of those helpers who make a friend's predicament 
their own. Trusts and directorates and presidencies seemed to 
reckon themselves fortunate if they could secure his name. 
Many of them he filled for a generation. Two of these, to name 
no others, were the presidencies of the Suffolk Savings Bank 
and of the New England Trust Company. And when the time 
came for him to turn them over to less enfeebled hands, he 
found himself resigning them by dozens. 

In stature Mr. Endicott was slight, his movements were 
quick and nervous — " alert in body and mind" — and his 
exceptionally little feet and hands were a constant reminder of 
the Huguenot extraction of his mother's kin. He was no in- 
different French scholar. Born at the starting point, in time 
and place, of the New England Unitarian movement, Mr. 
Endicott never had affiliations with any other sect, and his 
will made a substantial addition to the trust funds of the Bos- 
ton Young Men's Union and to the ministerial fund of the old 
First Church of Beverly in which he grew up and with which 
he was allied until, just before the war, he became a proprietor 
in King's Chapel at Boston. He was a Resident Member 
of this Society from March 8, 1906, until his death, contrib- 
uting to the Proceedings two valuable papers of personal 
reminiscence, and constant to a degree in his attendance on our 
meetings until growing infirmity made it a burden for him to 
climb the stairs. Mr. Endicott died in Boston, November 7, 
1 9 14, and was buried at Beverly, where he retained through 
life a cherished summer home. 

And so the old Commonwealth adds one more name to her 
list of worthies. 

Albert Thorndlke to Charles Francis Adams. 

_, . Boston, December 7, 1014. 

Dear Mr. Adams: 

Not one of the notices about William Endicott (that I have seen) 

has laid enough stress on the " personal" side of his character. It 



12 

is hoped that when the Massachusetts Historical Society memo- 
rial — which is the important record made — is written, this will 
be more strongly brought out. To those who knew him at all inti- 
mately, the delight of his personality as distinctly marked the man 
as did his public successes. 

He was fundamentally of strong will, firm opinions and earnest, 
though in manner very simple and unassuming, almost mild, not- 
withstanding his ability to enforce well his purpose. His bearing 
was unassuming and absolutely democratic; he held himself the 
same before all men. Those who met him knew this; but those 
who had seen him often also knew him as one of never failing 
kindly humor and wit, one who quickly saw and seized the humorous 
side. A joke was never forced by him nor humor overplayed; but 
the point was lightly and spontaneously brought out in a charac- 
teristic way, or if brought out by another, gratefully appreciated. 
Even in talk of serious things, the wit and the smile were ready and 
often used. Notwithstanding all the work accomplished, this 
lighter vein was, with him, always near the top. 

In his remarkable, tenacious and accurate memory were stored 
a host of anecdotes of the people he had met in his long and active 
life. Whether it was a statesman, a man of business, or even those 
in the humblest walks of life, what he had ever known of interest 
about them, he remembered. He would tell the stories well arid 
wittily, but with exactness, and often minutely dated them, though 
they might be sixty or seventy years old. It was a delight to hear 
him reminisce; and though likely that part of the pleasure was in 
the manner of the telling, still it is wished that various of these tales, 
trivial but entertaining, and touching on so many sorts and condi- 
tions of men and covering so much time, could have been preserved. 
Such things were not for a formal paper; so his Reminiscences, 
written for the Historical Society, do not have them. 

From his interest in grave subjects and the seriousness of his 
work, one might think of him as ponderous and solemn. Those 
who come after us will not know him, if they cannot see more of 
him than his achievements, his broad charity and kindnesses. 
With all this was the lighter side, the quick, quaint and gentle wit, 
the constant cheeriness (even in suffering), the love of the little 
brightnesses of life and the ability to joke (even when serious), all 
of which kept around him an atmosphere such as few are blessed 
enough to live in. Yours very truly, 

Albert Thorndike. 



